Player tries to fight me in real life after I kill his evil character

The game is d20 Star Wars. This story takes place in the middle of a campaign in the New Republic era (former Expanded Universe, taking place after the original trilogy)

I was playing a Jedi weaponmaster with a conflicted background, raised in the Empire before joining the new Jedi Order.

The game had taken a dark turn. Several party members had fallen in battle with a group of Sith. On threat of both of us dying, my character had been forced to fight and kill his best friend in a duel. I was initiated into their order, albeit reluctantly, feigning allegiance but harboring a deep hatred of the Sith in my heart.

The player who had died in the duel rolled up a Twi’lek Sith Sorceror named Krazin. His character was more of a pragmatist than truly dark, with questionable loyalty to his Master. The two of us were teamed up and tasked with building the Sith ranks by recruiting apprentices.

His first move was to attempt to intimidate and then force choke us. Both failed, but he came off as an appropriately dark character for the Sith, so we recruited him anyway. Drake was placed by the BBEG to be trained under the sorcerer Krazin, but spent most of his time complaining, arguing and sleeping underneath space shuttles, like an emo edgelord teen fighting with his stepdad.

Meanwhile, my character was sent off to try and recruit others for the growing Sith. I decided that it was time to turn on the BBEG. So I secretly contacted Krazin and let him know of my plan. Then, after some time away, I returned to the dark temple with three potential recruits, all cloaked. One of them was another PC, the wookiee jedi Lowooka (who had missed a few sessions), the others were Luke Skywalker himself, along with Kyle Katarn (an important Star Wars character before the EU was reset). We all attacked the Sith Lord, while simultaneously, Krazin turned on him and joined our side.

Drake would have none of it. He refused to join our side, instead taunting us like a typical villain. When I asked him to surrender he instead blasted me with force lightning. I stepped up and swung at him with my lightsaber. I crit. He died in one hit. (crits in Star Wars d20 were particularly lethal, especially with a Jedi Weaponmaster)

The villains were routed. The good guys were triumphant. My character was on his way to redemption. But Drake’s player, Bosco, was enraged. When the game ended, he confronted me in our friend’s driveway. “What the fuck!” he bellowed, his face red with anger. “You keep killing my characters! You want to fight me in real life?” He raised his fists, his eyes bulging with rage. Bosco was a big man, bulky if not fit. But he was not a scary man.

All I could do was smile, barely suppressing a fit of laughter. Bosco headed straight for his car, slammed the door and peeled off, his tires screeching as his car sped into the night. I would love to say that was the last I ever saw him. But no, he was back next week with a brand new terrible character.

I would love to say that was the last I ever saw him. But no, he was back next week with a brand new terrible character.

Never mind why he was allowed to return after he raised fists up against another player in real life, did he apologize at all? Or do anything to show he might have a modicum of self-awareness about anything at all? About his behavior in game or out of it?

This is a theme on this sub: it's usually pretty obvious that the horror stories arise from toxic tables where this kind of behavior is tolerated. This sub has taught me that there are whole social circles full of horrifying people.

Most horror stories I hear about usually come down to 1-2 things. A bad GM or a bad player. It’s rarely the entire group that is toxic. In my one bad campaign I’ve experienced it was both a bad GM and a very Bad player at the table that ruined it. The GM could’ve easily fixed everything but didn’t just like the player could’ve simply kept it in the game instead of taking things seriously.

That’s because most people are apaths and would rather avoid any and all confrontation. This isn’t true for all groups but i agree in most groups I’ve been in the majority of the table is passive.

Really only one dedicated group of a half dozen veteran D&D players from the 80’s have I noticed the opposite behavior. I rolled with them fora session they held at the loca store inviting new young rpg players in for a chance to have a fun 1-10lvl campaign. One of the high schoolers that joined was a toxic gamer and he felt it when all 6 of those old dudes turned his way and put things in a different perspective... to put it lightly.

That toxic player ended up being a great DM for his own group a few years later. Really rare event from what I’ve seen.

Okay sure I’ll tell it to the best of my memory. I always loved hanging out with mr ray and his pals.

So some background. Mr. Ray is a big bastard from Maine and he moved to my area in south Louisiana decades ago. Retirees military the dude has all the toys bells and whistles that any teenager would get crazy for I mean he had one of those law rocket launchers from Nam above his dining table... just a paradise for both nerds and southern kids so it was always awesome to hear his stories and hang out with him at the gaming store (mind you I and my friends were 18+ so it’s not like Mr Ray was hanging out with 13 year olds or children).

And honestly I can only remember one of his buddies names it’s been years since I’ve seen them all and they only really showed up for the RPGs were as mr ray liked to chill at the store watch some nerds play a game of WH40k or something.

So one summer Mr Ray and the store owner decide to try and get some new faces to join the store. So they put out a sign up sheet at the high school for new or veteran rpg players. I think like a good 5/6 players showed up mostly people I convinced to come but a couple new faces to even me showed up.

Anyway ray and friends spent the first session making sheets with everyone, explaining the basics of the rules down, house rules the whole big speech on player conduct. So I don’t remember the entire party but I know it was balanced out between tanks, support and FPS with the old guys filling in the roles that we didn’t want to play and of course mr ray ran a dwarven warrior.... the same thing he has been playing since the 1980’s haha. I ended up leaving the group after a few sessions do to personal reason but they said I could join in whenever I was free and they would just work around it. It was a level 1-10 campaign and they could easily come up with reasons to drop me in and out.

So I was bouncing in and out once a month on this weekly campaign. And the kid in question wasn’t a bad person just a kid going through some shit at home and took it out in the game. I think he was a juniour in high school at the time so 16/17 and he was on of those in game trolls. He would steal peoples shit and mess with them. He would do things to hurt the party just for dramatic flair and to be the spotlight. It got out of hand when he did something stupid and got half the party dead or near dead. The DM quickly fixed the situation reversing all the deaths and the kid got a bit pissy over that saying it wasn’t fair and not realistic and that he got such a good roll so it should happen.

He acted all pissy and complained all night. Towards the end of the session the dm and mr ray told him while everyone was packing up the reasons why they reversed what he did, explained to him why doing what he was doing was toxic gamer etiquette and that if he is the only one at the table having fun why does anyone else want to show up.

And he didn’t comeback to the campaign for like two or three sessions either for feeling bad or something I don’t know and he was pretty soft on the rest of the group until they were done.

But years later I saw him again and he had his own group and was dming for them so it really helped him out I’d say.

That is very true. Most people avoid facing the toxic GM or the toxic player: be it fear of getting flak and getting their characters punished or having your group of friends breaking. It sucks but if people were more confrontational we wouldn't have half of this sub stories.

Honestly my first ever group was run by a toxic af DM, his wife and his border line predatory best friend. We put up with them for years because A.) we were too young to know better B.) they were friends with the owner of the only game store in town and we didn't have another location and C.) aside from each other, who all met in one form or another through them or directly through one other person in this honestly obscenely large group we didn't have an alternative group and no one knew everyone felt the same.

Eventually a schism between the main 3 and the store owner ended up erupting into a schism of the entire group and most of us ended up playing together at the store while they, no longer being welcome at that store and also having the means to travel further and their own place, went else where just the 3 of them and like 2 others that stayed with them and we recruited more curious acquaintances from our respective highschools... but that split was long after stories that would be told in a place like this would have garned "just leave" responses. In the end it was our social circle and there's a reason people end up keeping toxic friends in general some times the unknown of the fall out seems possibly worse than simply continuing with the know bullshit

Yeah, it's a group dynamic thing. Nobody wants to be the one to sour the game for the rest of the group / nobody wants to get caught in the conflict if they are not the one targeted. Especially if they are rl friends with them for whatever reason. Being in a group makes it real easy to tell oneself that it isn't one's responsibility. It's fucking cowardly but, unfortunately, pretty common.

Jesus, that hits thd nail on the head for one of my stories. Rather, the one I submitted about a group of friends and how the group fell apart.

Or so I thought, as I recently heard. The DM reformed the group without some players and didn't tell me. Despite me already knowing and waiting for them to just say so or why they didn't tell me. Almost a year later. Frankly, as said in said horror story post, what hurt the most was how they kept making excuses on how they treated this and ended up othering me from the group. Even if that wasn't their intention for our group of friends, they're not trying to clean up their part of the situation.

Yeah, I've had the fortune of only experiencing one or the other at once. And even then, the bad GM was just inexperienced, might even have been her first game as a DM I think. Although she seemed to have suboptimal knowledge even for a player, I still can't blame her for her biggest flaw being something that everybody's guilty of when they're new.

The player, however, fit the bill of most of the milder (but still pretty infuriating) horror stories. He immediately tried to split off and do his own thing in a massive group with little room to explore for this one-shot. I felt it was implied we were supposed to split off into groups of maybe at least 3, given there was a small number of areas of interest we knew about, but whatever, maybe he's just trying to get things moving quickly. Well, 2 or 3 other PC's followed him, but he tried to prevent this before begrudgingly giving in to his solo side adventure taking on extra characters. In a group of about 15, he did by far the most roleplaying, rolls, etc.. Also should mention he was fudging rolls, which I only suspected until I watched him roll a 3 and call out "18" while picking his die back up, (I ignored this, but in my defense, this was near the end of the session, I could tell one good roll would not change much if anything, and I was ready to leave that session with mostly good moments on my mind; in the DM's defense for not finding it suspect, 15 people is A LOT of players to keep track of). As we entered the closing moments of the session, he watched half the group die without a word and threw a tantrum the moment it was suggested his character might not have made it out. The best part of the session was afterward when he said: "If every one-shot is gonna be like this, I'm not coming back." He was a man of his word, I'll give him that. Also, he actually had a decent Kobold voice (if that sounds like a knock on his IRL voice it's not, he RP'd his kobold's speech pattern pretty well for a mostly disorganized and at times disinterested table).

Wow managing 15 players. I cap out at 6 and then it becomes too much to please everyone. Maybe two groups and then maybe once every major event run them together but holy shit managing 15 people is hefty. Other than a sour player I hope it was an awesome adventure. 14/15 is not bad. He could’ve been one of those plague players that slowly turns a portion of the group against someone or even the dm.

Yeah, the player in question was complaining about that session being a no-win situation, but to me and other players that I talked to at least, it was such a fun homage to horror films, right down to the ambiguous ending where we didn't see the last few surviving players die, but one would assume so until proven otherwise. I did see him talking to one of the players I thought was cool after the session though, who also hasn't shown back up, so you might be right about that last point.

The DM himself is quite good, but nobody can really make a 15-player situation work too far above the level of "at least I'm playing D&D". Thankfully, he's been able to split DMing responsibilities with the aforementioned inexperienced DM, so the current group I'm part of now is more like 8 people. Still noticeably overpopulated at times, but that big a difference makes it feel like a proper game by comparison.

Dice fudging bugs me so damn much. Especially when it's also some min-maxed character designed to hit like a fireball every round. The math and probability is designed in a certain way to balance those kinds of abilities.

If my bard fudges an attack roll to do an average 6 damage when they're out of spells I don't mind too much. When the resident human variant paladin/rogue/pact blade warlock fudges rolls to dish out 30 damage every round, then you better not be cheating on top of that.

Being a commenter on this sub is kinda like watching a horror movie in the theaters. Sure, we might all want to scream, “Don’t open that closet!” but if the people in those movies and these stories did the sensible thing, where would we get our horror stories from?